By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab at MIT published Being Digital. In that tome we were told that “digital is coming,” that “digital is inevitable” and that “Bits are different from Atoms.” We were not, however told what we were supposed to DO about digital.

The business and technology media landscape are now awash with headlines, conferences and service providers declaiming the arrival of the Digital Age. One could read Digital Destiny [2015]; Digitized: The Science of Computers and How It Shapes Our World [2012]; Digital Transformation [2014]; Leading Digital [2014] and/or The New Digital Age. One could spend close to $200 for the textbook Digital Fundamentals [11^th Edition 2014]. One would be disappointed in the cognitive return one received were one to make such sizable temporal investments. The take away from all these tomes is that “digital is here.” The question is – what do we do about it?

No less an authoritative source than the National Intelligence Council, in their very well written work Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds concludes:

A] We find ourselves at a critical juncture in human history – a moment as signficant as 1815, 1918, 1945, and 1989; and

B] We are entering a period of uncharted territory.

This is not a map-reading moment. This is a map-making moment.

You Are Supposed to Be Confused!
If you are not a bit confused, disoriented and concerned you are not connected to the world as it actually is.

In Future Shock [1970], Third Wave [1980] and Power Shift [1990] ur-futurist Alvin Toffler described the macro-level impacts and dislocations associated with transitioning from one civilization to another [i.e., agricultural to industrial and industrial to informational]. Al and his wife/co-writer Heidi made the analogy that when you go to a foreign country and are bombarded by strange cues – sensory inputs that may be different from the ones emanating from your own culture – it is not surprising for one to become disoriented. When such misunderstanding persists sociologists and anthropologists call this condition “culture shock.”

In our current environment the disorientation being experienced by many senior management teams is not because you went to a new environment. What has essentially happened is that a new environment has come to you. When this new environment comes at you so rapidly such that you don’t understand its inputs and its cues you are experiencing what the Toffler’s term “future shock”.

Unbeknownst to many we are – once again - in the interregnum between civilizations.